Are Animal Crossing: New Horizons Balance Updates Necessary Or Making The Right Changes?

5 years ago Justin 20 Comments

Last week’s update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons brought a pair of balance adjustments to the game’s economy, and many of you had lots to say in our comments, so we thought we’d take a deeper look at this topic!

As we’ve previously covered, the latest Version 1.2 update made some pretty significant changes to the spawn rates of many bugs in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And in particular, these appearance rate changes tended to focus on reducing the chances of finding the more valuable bugs.

Another balance change we saw made in the April Update was a reduction in interest earned from bells stored in your ABD savings account with the Bank of Nook.

From what we’ve seen, this adjustment from the update resulted in two specific interest changes for savings accounts:

• The rate that you gain interested was decreased from 0.5% of your savings to only 0.05%.
• The maximum amount you can gain in a single interest letter was decreased from 99,999 Bells to 9,999 Bells

Those are some pretty substantial cuts in earnings and we have a hard time understanding why this is at all necessary. It’s likely that limiting the abuse of time traveling to rack up interest sooner than intended was one of the motivations, but surely there are more pressing abuses that involve time travel.

Taking both of these separate in-game economy balance changes together, we find it very interesting to see that Nintendo actually seems to be interested in making balance changes like this to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and possibly on a regular basis.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the idea of making these types of balance changes, but it’s certainly a whole new world for the Animal Crossing series. We’re used to decisions like bug spawn rates or interest rates being set in stone with the game’s release and working within those choices for the years to come!

If anything, this simply reflects the more modern world of video games that Animal Crossing lives within now where it’s just normal and expected for changes like these to be made with frequent updates to the game.

With these two changes made in Version 1.2, we can’t help wonder what other adjustments could be on the way in the future. In our view, this signals that Nintendo does have interest in attempting to balance Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ in-game economy — even if that may be a futile goal for a number of reasons.

If the developers are planning to continue trying to balance the economy, especially in regard to making bells based on the two changes so far focusing on that, we could definitely see further changes in other areas such as the Turnip Stalk Market.

We love purchasing turnips from Daisy Mae each week and checking our prices all week long alongside some friends, but it’s hard to not see the system as a little broken, especially in comparison to other money making methods in Animal Crossing.

It’s pretty doubtful small changes like interest rate or valuable bug spawn rates reductions can make a significant impact when it remains ridiculously easily to make millions every week by just dabbling in turnips for a few hours.

And even if they do make an impact, we have to ask a simple question — why? It’s not much fun to spend time catching bugs when the majority that you see are worthless common ones.

Spotting rare bugs that are actually worth something is far more enjoyable in terms of gameplay, and players are needing a lot of funds in New Horizons between the costs of building bridges and inclines or moving buildings around their island. What’s the harm in having a few more valuable bugs flying around?

If anything, it feels like Nintendo may be focusing on the wrong areas if their goal is to increase the balance of the in-game bell economy. Catching bugs with your net is hard work that actually involves active gameplay on the part of the player, whereas profiting off turnips is largely a passive activity, yet Animal Crossing: New Horizons rewards you so much more for it.

It’s not as if this is new or anything either — it was already the case before any update brought changes, but reducing the spawn rates of valuable bugs will only serve to increase the gap between the Turnip Stalk Market and nearly every other method of earning bells.

So if the Animal Crossing developers choose to make more bell economy changes in the future, we really hope they consider carefully exactly who is affected by what kinds of changes. As much as we love exploiting turnips, they deserve to be targeted with changes before many other money making methods.

What do you think of these balance changes Nintendo has made recently? Do you think they’re the right changes, or unnecessary? If there are going to be adjustments made to the in-game economy, what should be done? Please share your thoughts in the comments below — I’d love to hear!

For more on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, check out our many helpful pages on the game in the Guides section here.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons News Opinion